THE TIDE AT MY ANKLES (Part 1)

He went to China to find trade contacts. He stayed for a decade. In the early 1990s, Guy Lowe arrived in Beijing with a suitcase, a contract not worth the paper it was printed on, and no real plan. A veteran builder of more than 2,000 homes across the Pacific Northwest, centered on Portland, Oregon and surrounding areas, he had simply run out of appetite for what he knew. China, he told himself, would be a detour. It was not a detour. THE TIDE AT MY ANKLES is the memoir of a man who arrived in China as a construction professional and became something considerably harder to categorize. He built a steel rolling mill in Liaoning Province. He operated a villa that became an accidental diplomatic salon, hosting zone chiefs, mayors, and governors at his dinner table. He developed working relationships with the American embassy on matters that were never discussed directly. He built villas for PLA officers on Hainan Island — and fled the job site one step ahead of armed soldiers when the client refused to pay $80,000. Along the way he also: distributed pantyhose to a roomful of communist accountants who tried them on at their desks and announced that "the future is here." Watched an investor's son arrive in Hainan with entirely the wrong orientation for a wife-finding mission. Signed autographs as Bill Clinton in a stadium of 150,000 people who were absolutely certain they had seen the American president. Stood in his underwear at the front door of a Harbin villa while a provincial governor and his full television crew marched past him and into the bedroom where his interpreter lay wrapped in a sheet — while cameras documented the hardwood floors. None of it was planned. All of it happened. Told in the wry, unhurried voice of a man who has had years to think about what China meant, THE TIDE AT MY ANKLES is by turns hilarious, sobering, and quietly astonishing. It is a portrait of a country sprinting into the future while dragging centuries behind it — and of one foreigner who stepped into the current and decided not to run. "He never meant to become interesting. China didn't give him a choice."